


Searching Under Leaves At Midnight

by intotheruins



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magic, Soulmates, Souls, Whimsy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 08:19:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intotheruins/pseuds/intotheruins
Summary: When he was a child, Sherlock searched for souls. When he gave up on magic, he found one.





	Searching Under Leaves At Midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MemoryCrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemoryCrow/gifts).



> This was inspired by a series of snapshot paragraphs sent to me by [MemoryCrow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MemoryCrow/pseuds/MemoryCrow). It is also, I think, a little bit of me; I'm the sort of person who chases magic and faeries and souls in a time that is becoming more and more Atheist.

Sherlock turned over every rock and studied each blade of grass. He shook the leaves of the oak tree near the house, prodded at every wild flower, even stuck his head in more than a few burrows—but he couldn't find it anywhere.

The dead dove he'd found by the front door remained tucked against his chest while he continued his search. If he didn't find it soon, he'd take the bird back to his room and dissect it, study all the bits and pieces that made it tick, map out everything that made the body function in this physical world.

Mycroft found him kneeling by the door some time later, carefully shifting through every fallen leaf. He watched for a time, hands clasped behind his back, eyes too sharp and tired for his eleven years.

“It's not there,” he said.

Sherlock turned over the last leaf and set it in a pile with the others before looking up at his brother. “You don't know that.”

Mycroft sighed. “I do know that. Sherlock, there is no such thing as a soul.”

The urge to stick his tongue out at his brother was strong, but Sherlock clenched his teeth and looked down at the dead bird instead. Mycroft would just call him childish. He was four years old, didn't he have a right to be childish?

“You don't know that,” he repeated, tucking the bird closer. It wasn't in there anymore, he knew that much. This was a shell, left behind now that it no longer functioned. The soul of the creature was off doing whatever it was that happened after a body died. Couldn't map that; couldn't map a soul or its travel or anything, really, that existed outside the physical. At least not fully. Not until he went there himself, but he was in no hurry. He liked being physical. It was interesting.

“Even if it did exist,” Mycroft said. “You couldn't put it back. It would have to choose to go back.”

Sherlock frowned, and stroked a finger down the bird's head.

“I can't find it,” he said, blatantly ignoring his brother's words. “It's doing something else now. I'm going to dissect this.”

He stood up and started toward the door, only to pause when his brother called out, “If there was such a thing as a soul, what do you think it became next?”

It was more whimsy than he'd ever heard from his brother—Sherlock grinned as he let the possibilities race through his mind.

“Maybe it's me,” he said. “Maybe I'm the bird.”

~

“Freak!”

Sherlock scowled, and put the autumn-burnt leaf down on the table beside his chemistry book. He'd had such high hopes for University but it was, unfortunately, just like everywhere else. Idiots and bullies, and the occasional good-natured soul who was either threatened by Sherlock's intelligence or simply couldn't stand him, in the end.

A boy with crazy black hair and a face full of smile lines collapsed into the chair opposite Sherlock, plunking down the biggest coffee the cafeteria had to offer. “You keep looking in the leaves. Have you tried anywhere else?”

Victor was the only exception. Sherlock could scowl across the table at him and Victor would beam back, even laugh and kick Sherlock playfully under the table.

“I'm not looking _in_ the leaves.” Sherlock lifted his leaf and thrust it pointedly in Victor's direction. “I'm looking _under_ them.”

“Ah, I see.” Victor plucked the leaf from Sherlock's fingers and stuck it behind his own ear like a flower. “Actually, no I don't.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “That's where it can be found. Under, or in between.”

“Right, okay. Souls and things. In between. I think I've heard that before. Doorways, and midnight, things like that?”

“Yes.” Sherlock eyed the leaf, the way it drooped over Victor's ear, one point brushing against his cheek. It was rather fetching, actually.

“Have you tried looking under leaves at midnight?”

“Of course I have!”

Victor laughed, holding his hands up in a sign of peace. “Alright, alright! Well, what about doorways at midnight?”

Sherlock opened his mouth to respond, and just as quickly snapped it shut. He frowned down at his chemistry book, then scowled as he reached across the table to snatch Victor's coffee away from him.

“No,” he admitted. He swallowed down half the coffee before sliding it back to its proper owner. “I haven't tried that.”

“Well then.” Victor slid a hand into Sherlock's, tangling their fingers and only grinning all the harder when Sherlock pretended to deepen his scowl. “I know what we're doing on our date tonight.”

~

The drugs let him see it.

Cocaine let him forget Victor, ignore his brother; it chased away the suffocation of boredom and let him  _see._ In the doorways, appearing to him as small colored lights that darted this way and that, never quite settling, never quite corporeal. Under leaves, little humanoid forms that giggled and scampered away, waving as they disappeared. The others, different forms of existence beyond the realm of the physical, of science. Existence that drove him mad with its blatant disregard for the rules of his world, and yet he sought it out with the same ferocity that he chased experiments and chemicals and the thrill of a good case. 

It was the souls that continued to escape him. No use trying to find those with science; they existed in those other places, or no-places. The cocaine let him see so much, but it refused to give him that.

~

The first time Sherlock saw a soul, it was years after he'd given up his pursuit of magic and chosen to focus strictly on science.

Mike Stamford walked into the lab, and behind him came a man with a cane and a limp and a partial tan, his life story open for the taking in his stance and his words and the tremble in his left hand, and Sherlock barely saw any of it because there, all around the physical form of him, was a kind of glow. It wasn't quite there, not enough for Sherlock to truly say he was seeing it with his eyes—it was more like looking at a memory. Easy to visualize, yet not truly in front of him. It had no color, or perhaps a color he couldn't see. It had, in a sense, motion, and the moment the man came to stand by the work table it seemed to reach for him.

Sherlock knew him. He knew the man to be his, and he didn't even know his name.

Mike said, “This is an old friend of mine, John Watson,” and Sherlock took the name into himself, into the place that wasn't his heart or his brain but that bit he'd always known to be his own soul, even when he was trying to suppress it, to pretend there was no such thing as Mycroft had always told him.

_Go. Go now, before he isn't yours._

He needed to send a text, and it was the perfect opening; Mike had forgotten his phone, and this man, this John, he was polite, he would offer his in Mike's place.

Sherlock opened his mouth to ask, and what came tumbling out was, “Have you ever searched under leaves at midnight?”

Mike had heard many a strange thing from Sherlock's mouth and never so much as batted an eye, yet when he heard this he turned to stare at the detective as though he'd never seen him before. Though he held perfectly still and maintained eye contact, Sherlock desperately wanted to bash his head against the tabletop.

And then he didn't because John Watson began laughing, a sort of desperate, warm laugh that came from being shocked out of a dark place.

“No!” John gasped, leaning forward at the same moment his soul reached further across the table toward Sherlock. His cane had fallen, forgotten, in his mirth—his left hand, braced against the table, was no longer shaking. “What would I find there?”

Sherlock stood, and walked right into John's space—he fancied he could feel their souls tangling. Perhaps he could, in some strange way, his body interpreting as best it could.

“It depends,” Sherlock said, “On what you're willing to see.”

They stood like that, staring at each other, for long enough that even Sherlock knew it had reached the level of socially awkward, yet John seemed just as comfortable with the closeness as Sherlock was. Maybe he felt it, too. Maybe he was thinking that Sherlock was his, as much as Sherlock was thinking the same of John.

“I play the violin when I'm thinking,” Sherlock said finally. “Sometimes I don't talk for days on end. Would that bother you? Potential flatmates should know the worst about each other.”

John blinked. “And sometimes you search under leaves at midnight.”

“Would you consider that the worst?”

“No.” John chuckled. “But who said anything about flatmates? I don't even know your name.”

The deductions flowed from Sherlock's mouth instantly, spilling well beyond how he knew the reason John was there and into John's history in the army, just to impress, to watch John's eyes light with curiosity and awe.

Then he grabbed his coat and whirled out the door, pausing only to throw out, “The name's Sherlock Holmes, and the address is 221b Baker Street,” before he left John standing there, stunned.

He would be on Sherlock's doorstep in less than twenty-four hours. In twenty-six, they would be solving their first crime together.

In just over forty-eight they would be stumbling through the park late at night, high on adrenaline from the cab driver case, turning over leaves and giggling like madmen.

Maybe he was the bird, and falling in love with John Watson was his new way of learning how to fly.

 


End file.
